was terrible. I said such stupid things. My mind seemed frozen.

"I would hear music," she whispered, "before I go again."

"Marion, you shall," I stammered. "Beethoven, Schumann,--what would
please you most? You shall have all."

"Yes, play to me. But those names"--she shook her head--"I do not
know."

I remember that my face was streaming, my hands so hot that her head
seemed more than I could hold. I shifted my knees so that she might
lie more easily a little.

"God's music!" she cried aloud with startling abruptness; then,
lowering her voice again and smiling sadly as though something came
back to her that she would fain forget, she added slowly, with
something of mournful emphasis:

"I was a singer ..."

As though a flash of light had passed, some inner darkness was cleft
asunder in me. Some heaviness shifted from my brain. It seemed the
years, the centuries, turned over like a wind-blown page. And out of
some hidden inmost part of me involuntary words rose instantly:

"You sang God's music then ..."

The strange, unbidden sentence stirred her. Her head moved slightly;
she smiled. Gazing into my eyes intently, as though to dispel a mist
that shrouded both our minds, she went on in a whisper that yet was
startlingly distinct, though with little pauses drawn out between the
phrases: "I was a singer... in the Temple. I sang--men--into evil.
You ... I sang into ... evil."

There was a moment's pause, as a spasm of inexplicable pain passed
through my heart like fire, and a sense of haunting things whereof no
conscious memory remained came over me. The scene about me wavered
before my eyes as if it would disappear.

"Yet you came to me when I lay dying at the last," I caught her thin
clear whisper. "You said, 'Turn to God!'"

The whisper died away. The darkness flowed back upon my mind and
thought. A silence followed. I heard the wind in the poplar overhead.
The doctor moved impatiently, coming a few steps nearer, then turning
away again. I heard the sounds of tinkering with metal that the
driver made ten yards behind us. I turned angrily to make a
sign--when Marion's low voice, again more like the murmur of the wind
than a living voice, rose into the still evening air:

"I have failed. And I shall try again."

She gazed up at me with that patient, generous love that seemed
inexhaustible, and hardly knowing what to answer, nor how to comfort
her in that afflicting moment, I bent lower--or, rather, s